Abstract
Organizations remember through narratives and storytelling. The articles in this Special Issue explore the interface between organization studies, memory studies, and historiography. They focus on the practices for organizational remembering. Taken together, the articles explore the similarities and differences between ethnographic and historical methods for studying memory in organizations, which represents a contribution to the historic turn in organization studies.
Knowingly or unknowingly, and to varying degrees, organizations continually construct their cultures and identities through memory and history (Linde, 2009). Organizations make sense of the present, creating new knowledge, but also consigning other knowledge to oblivion, through narratives of their past. The strategic use of history, or ‘rhetorical history’ (Suddaby et al., 2010), is increasingly recognized as significant in organization theory, as well as marketing, where heritage often constitutes a component of corporate brands (Hansen, 2010; Urde et al., 2007). The process of remembering and forgetting is inevitably selective, whether conscious or unconscious, as organizations continually make and remake their history, lest others create it for them (Hegele and Kieser, 2001). Organizations are enabled and constrained by narratives of their past (Hansen, 2007), with potentially profound implications for cultural change as organizations can be locked into the grand narratives of nations and capitalism.
The concept of organizational memory has been taken up by the knowledge management and story consulting fads, where, as Boje (2008) argues, stories, memory, and history are treated instrumentally, as ‘knowledge assets’ to be tapped into as and when required. As a result, the initial systematic formulation of organizational memory (Walsh and Ungson, 1991) has been widely cited in organization studies (Anderson and Sun, 2010), but rarely criticized (Casey and Olivera, 2011). However, as Casey (1997) pointed out, the problem with the dominant storage bin model of organizational memory is that collective memory is not like a book or a computer which can be retrieved at any time in the same form in which it was originally lodged. In the wider field of social memory studies, it is generally accepted that experiences are recreated or reconstructed rather than retrieved through memory. Social memory studies has expanded rapidly, with its own specialist journals (Hoskins et al., 2008) and edited collections (Olick et al., 2011), but it remains focused on the family, ethnicity, and nation as mnemonic communities, with relatively little regard for the way in which corporations have increasingly appropriated social memory. The articles in this Special Issue, therefore, are located at the interface of organization studies, memory studies, and historiography, with a focus on narratives of the past in organizations.
As Adorisio (2014) proposes, the focus on narrative reconciles the various critiques of organizational memory studies (Nissley and Casey, 2002; Rowlinson et al., 2010) and integrates them around the concept of ‘organizational remembering’ (Feldman and Feldman, 2006). Each of the articles highlights the various practices for remembering in organizations. Cruz (2014) explains how, in the post-conflict context of Liberia, the alternative forms of organizing preferred by market women, in susu groups, which are a kind of rotating credit association, shaped their memories of trauma. Ybema (2014) demonstrates how organization members can construct a periodization which separates them from the past, through a practice that Ybema describes as ‘invented transitions’. As a play on ‘invented tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1992; Rowlinson and Hassard, 1993), the concept of invented transitions questions the implication that organization members invariably look to the past for continuity. Drawing on Actor–Network Theory (ANT), Humphries and Smith (2014) examine how an object, the Xerox 914 plain copier, can tell the official story of an organization. Decker (2014) considers corporate architecture itself, as well as the corporate commemorative events associated with particular buildings, as practices of organizational remembering. The most strategic practices for using the past are examined by Maclean et al. (2014), where at Procter & Gamble, archival sources, such as speeches by P&G senior executives, are kept and referred to as part of the organization’s sensemaking in the present.
Taken together, one of the most interesting contributions of the articles in this special issue is in relation to the range of methods that can be used to study narrative and memory in organizations, in particular the relation between historical and ethnographic methods. Ybema demonstrates how historical and ethnographic methods can be combined for a case study of memory in an organization, whereas Humphries and Smith propose a methodological position in which narratives are ‘collected’ from nonhuman objects, such as the Xerox 914 copier. The other four articles can be divided according to their emphasis on either ethnographic (Musacchio Adorisio; Cruz) or historical approaches (Decker; Maclean, Harvey, Sillince, and Golant). It would be tempting to draw a simple distinction between ethnographic methods, involving some form of direct observation or participation in an organization, and archival–historical methods. However, if we look more closely at how their research was actually conducted, these distinctions are less clear-cut.
From the ethnographic side, Cruz’s ‘African feminist ethnography’ is predicated on an historical understanding of post-conflict Liberia, where ‘African’ signals the need for historical context and an appreciation of African heterogeneity. Musacchio Adorisio draws more explicitly on the methods of microhistory, derived from the work of historians such as Ginzburg (1992 [1976]), to trace ‘narrative fragments’ from interviews. Musacchio Adorisio sees a parallel between microhistory and Boje’s (2001) concept of antenarrative, in that both seek to explain the fragments that exist outside or before master narratives. Both Cruz and Musacchio Adorisio use ethnographic methods, not so much to recover the past itself, but to examine the practices and stories whereby the past is represented in memory. The interest in historical methods such as microhistory can be seen as an extension of the ‘historic turn’ in organization theory (Clark and Rowlinson, 2004; Wadhwani and Bucheli, 2014).
In parallel with the historic turn in organization studies, there has also been a turn to organization theory in business history, and more specifically a turn toward culture and narrative (Rowlinson and Delahaye, 2009), which includes memory (Fridenson, 2008; Scranton and Fridenson, 2013). Whereas business history was once seen as a branch of economic history, subordinate to economic theory, leading business historians are increasingly concerned with culture and narrative representations of the past (Hansen, 2012; Popp, 2009), which leads toward an engagement with organization theory. As a business historian, Decker (2014) emphasizes the ethnographic aspects of doing archival research in Nigeria and Ghana, where her observations on the national archives building itself, and reflection on her own working conditions, clearly inform her interpretation of architecture and organizational remembering in West Africa. Maclean et al.’s (2014) working conditions during their research in the Procter & Gamble archives in Cincinnati were presumably more comfortable than Decker’s, but they acknowledge the inevitable ideological effect of the ambience they enjoyed. The point to emphasize here is that in both cases, Decker and Maclean et al.’s immersion in their archival sources also involved the kind of field trips and relationships of trust that organizational ethnography is more usually associate with (e.g. Yanow and Geuijen, 2009), rather than the desk-based research with readily available published texts that ethnographers might imagine historians doing (e.g. Van Maanen, 1988).
Not only is the process of doing archival research more ethnographic than might be imagined, but Decker’s (2014) description of her research as ‘archival ethnography’ also refers to her interpretation of archival sources, which is informed in part by postcolonial theory (Decker, 2013; Spivak, 1988). If Decker’s research could be categorized as a form of ‘ethnographic history’, then Maclean et al.’s (2014) systematic document analysis veers toward the kind of replicable procedure associated with ‘serial history’ (Rowlinson et al., 2014), even though their theoretical interpretation of ideology and sensemaking ranges widely from Althusser to Weick.
The engagement between business historians and organization theorists (Bucheli and Wadhwani, 2014) has highlighted the similarities and differences between alternative approaches to researching the past and representations of the past. The articles in this special issue extend that engagement specifically in relation to narrative and memory. Their theoretical orientations vary widely, but Humphries and Smith’s (2014) use of ANT is possibly more in line with what seems to be an emerging trend in organization studies for the interpretation of archival sources and the construction of archive themselves. Durepos and Mills (2012a, 2012b) have proposed a full-blown ANTi-History as an alternative to conventional historiography, which they have applied to the history of the airline industry (Durepos et al., 2008). Other historically oriented organization theorists have invoked ANT to interpret archival sources, but with a lighter touch (e.g. Bruce and Nyland, 2011; Hassard, 2012). There is clearly much scope for further dialogue between historical and ethnographic researchers regarding their methodological and theoretical preferences for interpreting narrative and memory in organizations.